“Are you almost done?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I hurriedly pulled on the shorts and, after a quick moment of deliberation, ditched my waterlogged bra. “Done,” I said, as the hood of the sweatshirt fell over my ears.
Gilly turned back around.
I gathered up my clothes. “Can I hang these up?”
He shrugged and flopped down on his bed. I hung them over the bar in the closet. I ran my hand over the clothes hung in appealing, orderly rows: lots of plaid button-downs and cartoon characters on T-shirts. All of them were soft and smelled fresh and clean.
I turned and surveyed Gilly’s room. The walls were painted a warm honey-brown color with white trim. They were mostly bare, except for a framed reproduction of a painting of red and orange squares—Rothko, I remembered from AP Art History—over the bed, and, above the desk, columns of typewritten paper. They were pinned to the wall with thumbtacks, each slightly overlapping the one underneath. I picked up one at random.
Enter HELENA. Cue amber-gel spotlight. Cut sound when HELENA reaches downstage right.
“Are these stage directions?”
“Some of them. Hey, don’t go through my desk, all right?”
Deciding to be the bigger person and refrain from reminding him that he’d rifled through my desk, I moved away with my hands up. I spun in place, taking a visual tour of a stacked shelf of stereo, DVD, and Xbox equipment next to a small television, a turtle tank with a prop pirate ship, a bookshelf arranged by color, an antique safe with empty Red Bull cans piled high on top of it in a tidy triangle. Finally, my survey reached Gilly himself, lying on his bed diagonally with one arm behind his head, and my breath cut off mid-inhale.
While my back was turned, he had taken off his wet clothes and pulled on sweatpants from out of nowhere, but he was still damp, and his black undershirt, the tank top kind, stuck to him. His cheeks were rosy, and his skin glittered with raindrops.
“I like your room,” I croaked.
Gilly examined me as I stood in front of his bed, wearing his clothes. It was as if he was trying to do one of those optical illusion image searches. He was frowning, but his eyes were soft.
“Can I ask you something?” he asked.
I stepped closer to the bed and touched the covers. His comforter had a design of blue and darker blue checks and was made of that nubby cotton that all boys’ comforters seem to be made of.
I sat down on the floor instead and nodded. Gilly propped himself up on one elbow and angled himself toward me. I braced myself for a barrage of questions about my deliveries that week and a lecture about going to the cops.
“Why would you sleep with that guy?” I must have looked confused, because he added quickly, “With Grant Powers, I mean.”
I wasn’t prepared for that. I looked down and picked at the throw rug. Slowly, head bent, I said, “He and Audrey were broken up. I didn’t know they were getting back together.”
“That’s not what I meant. Why that guy?”
I looked up. Gilly was looking at me with plaintive, burning eyes, and his mouth hung open slightly, like a little kid the first time he realizes that you can just ask “why?” forever—you’ll never reach the end.
Avoiding his eyes, I shrugged. “Boredom? Nymphoman—?”
“Stop it,” he cut me off sharply. “I’m asking you. Seriously. Why? Did you actually like him?”
The questions caught me in their crosshairs. As I stared at them, I felt something in my chest bend backward, and, suddenly, I hurt.
“I liked the way he made me feel,” I said. I looked away, ashamed. “For about five minutes, he made me feel like I was the way I was supposed to be. No, not even—” I struggled to put what I was thinking into words. “He made me feel like I was better than what I was supposed to be. Do you know what I mean?”
He didn’t answer.
I groped for a way to explain. I resorted to numbers. “Let’s say I was a 7. Like, the numeral 7. And I was feeling pretty secure and happy about being a 7. With Grant, it was like I suddenly had an exponent next to that 7 and it had always been there; I’d just never noticed. I had never been 7. I had always been 7 to the power of 10.”
Gilly’s lips went crooked. “You’re such a dork. The jockettes have no idea.”
I smiled wryly. “Yeah, well, the whole thing was an illusion. An isolated incident I probably wouldn’t think about anymore at all, if it hadn’t blown up in such spectacular fashion.”
“So you don’t like him?”
“No,” I said automatically and then stopped, surprised. I continued slowly, gauging the truth of my words as I spoke them. “No. It turns out that nothing that Grant says or does actually means anything. He’s pretty simple: He wants what he wants when he wants it. He doesn’t get deeper than that.”
“But you did like him.”
“I think . . .” I stopped and tried again. “I think Grant is a good person to play pretend with. I liked someone I made up, and he resembled that person enough to make me believe it was him.”
Gilly started drumming his fingers erratically on the covers. It was making me nervous, so I changed the subject. “You asked me that? You find me barefoot in the rain, and you have no other questions?”
He smiled and put his arms back behind his head, apparently satisfied with my answers. “Nah. I just figured you got kidnapped by more drug dealers.”
“Funnily enough, that’s exactly what happened.”
He bolted up. “What?”
I fell onto the floor on my back. “Relax, I handled it.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
“Fine, Rambo, but I don’t know what you think you’re going to do about it.”
I stayed on my back while I told the story. He looked down at me the whole time, his face a storm cloud.
“So, I just kept running until I was sure they hadn’t come after me,” I finished. “And then it started raining, and then I ran into you. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Gilly had an expression on his face like he’d accidentally drunk bad milk. “Are you crazy? Can I call the cops now?”
I sat up. “No,” I said firmly, “you can’t call the cops. Not after everything I’ve gone through. Nothing has changed. There are just more . . . complications. But I doubt I’ll ever see those guys again. I’m going to find the thief and turn him over to Mason, and it will be over.”
“Wait—you’re still looking for the guy who ripped him off? I thought you were delivering now.”
“It’s a side deal I made with Mason,” I said slowly. “If I find the thief before Texas, I can stop delivering.” I smoothed my forehead, where there was still a ghost of a bump from Jo knocking me to the ground. “I guess I hadn’t thought about what would happen to whoever stole it, though. Huh.”
“Nothing good—are you OK with that?” Gilly sounded tense but matter-of-fact.
I frowned. “You know that whoever stole it is 100 percent the same person who hacked my profile and got me into this mess, right? I don’t owe them anything. Except maybe revenge.” I rubbed my bare feet, damp and bruised from the rough pavement of the sidewalks. “I don’t know. I’ll have to see how it plays out. It’s not like I’m behind the wheel here.”
“Right,” Gilly said caustically. “Just an innocent bystander.”
“What is your problem?” I shouted. He looked toward his door, and I lowered my voice. “Whose side are you on? I didn’t ask for your help, remember. And, yeah, as it happens, I am an innocent bystander. I wasn’t the one who stole from a drug dealer and then framed a newly easy target for it.”
He put up his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I know you didn’t. You don’t—I don’t think you did anything to deserve all of this.”
“Except pin a social ‘Kick Me’ sign to my ass.”
“Either way. Not your fault.” He moved onto his stomach and put his hand on my shoulder awkwardly. After a second, he let go.
“Thanks,” I mutte
red, still unsettled. His face was very close to mine. He smiled and reached out a finger, brushing an eyelash off of my cheek. He held it up for me to make a wish. Looking at his eyes like crystals, I blew it away, not wanting to think too hard about the wish.
Suddenly I remembered something. “Oh shit! Shit, shit, shit!” I jumped up and started for the closet to get my clothes.
“What? What happened?”
I pulled my bra off the rack and tucked it under the sweatshirt to put it on, too nervous to be modest. “I left my freaking front door unlocked! It closed behind me, but they dragged me out of there, and it’s not like I had a key stashed in my gym shorts.”
“But it’s still raining.”
I pulled my straps on and started digging around his drawers for a pair of flip-flops, or even socks. “You don’t get it. If anything happens to my parents’ turntable, I don’t even know what they’ll do—it won’t be the candy-ass ‘grounding’ I’m getting right now, I’ll tell you that much.”
Gilly drove me the quarter of a mile or so to my house. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that the door had shut firmly enough behind me: A plastic bag that had been hanging from the inside doorknob was still wedged in the jamb from the force of my being yanked across the threshold.
“Looks like it’s OK,” I said, turning to Gilly. “Thanks for the ride.”
He turned and grabbed my shoulders again, shaking me so my head bobbed like a Cabbage Patch Kid’s.
“Will you be fucking careful until Monday?” he asked gruffly.
“Uh, sure. OK.”
Our faces were very close together. I was breathing in the heat rising off of his skin. I made an involuntary move to get closer to the briny, fresh smell of him. His fingers tightened on my shoulder blades through the soft, slightly damp fabric of his sweatshirt.
I lifted my chin toward him, and our faces were so close that our lips accidentally touched. It was a soft, gentle brush more than it was a kiss, but it was enough for me to breathe in deep and him to startle away. He abruptly let go and leaned over me, pushing open the door. “OK. Get out, then.”
I stumbled out onto the curb in a daze, my brain screaming to finish the sentence that grazing of lips had started. I turned back to say something—anything—that might give me a scrap of that feeling to hold on to, to study, but he was already peeling down the street. I watched him round the corner, feeling like I had an overfilled water balloon in my chest.
In my first stroke of good luck all month, no one had broken into the house. I went up to my room and stripped out of the borrowed clothes, running a hot shower in the bathroom. It was just when I was feeling some of the tension melt off of my shoulders that I realized I had left Rockford’s knife sandwiched between damp clothing, balancing precariously on a bar in Gilly’s closet.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When I got up monday morning, I felt strange. Different. I moved through my routine quickly and easily—dress, brush teeth, sneak past sleeping parents, grab banana, check for keys, check for cell phone, leave just as my mom yells for me to wake up—but something was definitely different.
I didn’t find a seat on the subway that morning, but for once I didn’t care. Bumps in the track swung my body around the pole, but instead of exhausted, morning motion sickness, I felt strength and energy radiate through me. I zigged back and forth, testing my center of gravity, zinging with pure physical joy. I felt high.
I couldn’t focus at all. Not on what anyone was saying. All morning, my brain kept playing over the images from the weekend. The way it felt when Vin yanked me through my front door. The look on Rockford’s face when I kicked him in the balls. The weight of the knife falling into my hand. The crackle in the air before the sky opened over my head.
The sharp nip of Gilly’s teeth behind his lips the moment I barely touched them with mine.
This was a high. Maybe just an adrenaline high, but a high nonetheless.
And, like any junkie, I wanted my next fix. But, for the first time since the nurse’s office, Gilly just wasn’t there. I had gotten used to seeing him out of the corner of my eye, but he wasn’t in any of the usual spots I associated with Gilly: the desk by the door, the alcove corner next to the stairs, the floor in front of his locker—he was just nowhere. It didn’t make sense.
A pressure had built up, and, at Howell anyway, it had nowhere to go without him there. So it was with a mixture of nervousness and relief that I finally saw him opening his locker after last period.
I loitered in the senior hallway, trying to catch his eye, but Gilly kept his gaze steadily on the floor.
I stepped closer to him, standing right behind him when he knelt to zip his backpack. He fumbled with the straps, his hands too fidgety to work properly, but he had a rod-straight spine and staunchly refused to even crane his neck around.
“Gilly,” I said, nerve endings buzzing.
He froze. I moved forward. “Should we . . . ?” I swallowed, not sure why I felt such a charge around someone I hadn’t even kissed on purpose. “Should we talk?”
Gilly rose slowly, like an old person, weighted down and careful. “I . . .” he cleared his throat. “I can’t today, Kendall. I’m sorry.”
Without turning to look even in my direction, he shouldered his bag and bolted out the double doors.
I was left standing alone, staring after him, wondering whether or not I had actually been rejected by Michael Gilbert and, more, why that should hurt so much?
What did I want from him? Why did I want him?
My high from the morning contracted until it was nothing more than a glowing ember of anxiety sitting firmly in my chest.
The next day after school was when I started to feel watched.
I made the right turn from Howell to the F train like always and everything was perfectly normal. But about halfway down the block, my eyes dragged to the left, drawn to something just outside my vision. I stopped and turned my head as slowly as I could. There was nothing there.
I kept on walking, trying to put it out of my mind.
It didn’t go away.
For the rest of the week, every time I left school, it was as though someone was standing very close behind me, casting the tiniest of shadows, but I couldn’t catch them at it.
On Friday, the train was crowded, and any number of people could have been looking at me. I turned my head this way and that, scanning the faces, catching an eye here and there, but no one registered. I exited the train frowning, feeling like I was either missing something or going crazy.
I turned a corner and bent to tie my shoe. And then I heard it.
A scrape of rubber on pavement. One scrape, two, and then it stopped. I stood up slowly and started walking, careful not to turn around. Scrape, scrape, scrape: paced like a heartbeat.
I walked past my block to the Bank of America without turning around, and I didn’t turn around in the lobby, either, just pressed myself against a wall and waited.
I counted slowly to ten and inched closer to the double doors leading outside. The sidewalk outside was empty.
He can’t be gone. I can’t just be making it up. I stood still, with the linoleum pressing against my back, waiting to see . . . something, anything, to prove I wasn’t hallucinating on top of everything else.
Just when I was about to give up, there it was: a tiny flick of white at the edge of the right-hand glass door.
I straightened up and clenched my fists, pumping my muscles. I wanted to feel strong. I turned left out of the building, took five steps, and then, with as close to a prayer as I get, I spun on my heels and launched to the right, slamming into a hard, muscled chest. I looked up and sucked in my breath.
It was Rockford.
“You!” I gasped, staring into his dark eyes behind the owlish frames.
“And you,” he answered. Then he moved so precisely, so gracefully, that I was pinned up against the alley wall next to the bank before I even registered his hands on my hip and shoulder.
“Not so sassy now, are you, Evans?” Rockford asked, looking at me like I was a bug.
“Don’t you remember?” I answered, working hard to catch my breath. “I’m just a little high school girl.”
He chuckled a little grudgingly. “Right,” he said in a gruff tone. “I forgot. You’re completely innocent.”
“That’s right, officer.” I smiled up at him. “Now why don’t you let go of me before I scream.”
He loosened his grip but didn’t quite let go. “First we have to have a talk.”
I struggled against his hand, but he was too strong. Finally, I gave up and looked at him. “Why are you following me?” I asked.
“Because I wanted to see how you spend your time. Get a feel for who you are.”
“Why?” I squeaked. “I really am just a high school girl. I’m no one.”
His smile faded, and his voice got soft but serious. “You need to keep your head down and stay out of my way,” he said, looking at me intensely. I could feel the heat rising out of his pores. “I’m not sure what you’re angling for here. I don’t know how you got involved with Mason. But believe me when I say that you are not up for this. Stay away from Mason, stay away from his drugs. Don’t go looking for any more trouble—and by that, I mean his drugs. You will find it.”
I drew a shaky breath, and he squeezed my shoulder. “I’m warning you,” he told me. “I’ll be watching.” He let go. I reflexively grabbed my shoulder and rubbed the smarting skin.
And by the time I looked up again, he was gone.
When I got home, I took out my laptop and made a list of everything I knew about Rockford. There was very little.
Name: Joey Rockford. Occupation: student at Columbia. Associations: rivals with Mason, friendly with Jerry, partners with Vin. Interested in Mason’s drug supply.
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